Kingsley Amis - Memoirs

Thank God I can still read and I can still write despite - although the wireless network connector has just fallen over and I can't save this at the moment, then the browser froze and I can’t even type so I’m continuing in Word, ready to paste back here> That was very irritating, the whole PC freezing up, DNS look-up gone to fuck and Christ knows what else. Maybe this is just the psychic version of the pathetic fallacy updated for the Internet, but one knows that it is just coincidence. One of those difficult times which one does realize are shared by countless millions but trapped in your own little bubble it is difficult to find this comforting other than in an abstract "well this is what its like for lots of people kind of way".
Kinglsey Amis, amazingly, tried all different kinds of therapy, because he suddenly found that he was having panic attacks on empty trains, or when he went out anywhere. He talks about "fears of depersonalisation", first from dark nights, then from getting on empty trains. Sounds like panic attacks, which I used to get but don't seem to now, where you suddenly experience this immense fear that you are going to literally disappear. It's in the section of the Memoirs entitled shrinks, and he doesn't think very much of them and if his reporting of their input is accurate, neither do I.

My current therapist, who I have only been seeing for a few weeks, I chose because she looked and sounded interesting (my wife added, yes and young and attractive too), and didn't look like one of those people who've spent years and years making a living out of chatting to people with half - arsed complaints like me, but someone who was interested in what makes people tick. And largely I talk in the sessions, so there is little of the framing / reframing of the problem that Amis complained about. When it does arrive, usually in the from of a "well that sounds positive, that's good" or something "positive" like that I merely look pained and bewildered and say "No that's not it" It's hard to say if it's going anywhere at all - we've established that I feel trapped by lots of situations, that I use depressants to suppress my emotions, that I would like to escape some of these props and prisons, but just stating the problem isn't solving it by any means.

One of the reasons that I'd like to stop taking any kind of depressant is that it stops me thinking properly. I remember once seeing Germaine Greer interviewed and the thing that stuck out, in fact the only thing I remember about the interview was that she said that she loved thinking, that being able to think was the thing that she most enjoyed doing. That certainly resonated with me, and it's why sometimes when I've perhaps drunk too much while cooking, so that I can't really think clearly and accurately,  then the only thing I can think of to do is to go to bed and sleep even if it is only 8pm in the evening or earlier. This feels like such a waste of time, but once the drugs are loaded in your system there's nothing you can do except wait for your body to process them. Which begs the question of course of why load up in the first place? Well that question is of course the key, and some of the answer is that it's all about passing the time, about getting through the time, and without something huge and beautiful and wonderful to do the time drags heavily and dangerously and depressingly. The answer is to do something, anything, but keeping doing things - keeping writng would be a fucking start, actually get some more things finished.